PARTY

The PARTY workshops were held in Namibia and South Africa during research mobilities in 2015 and 2016 (Figure 13). The mobilities were part of a research project called Participatory Development with the Youth, or PARTY, which was ongoing from 2015 to 2018. The overall aim of the project was to endorse human development and assist in reducing youth unemployment in South Africa and Namibia. The European Union funded the project from the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) programme under the Marie Skłodowska- Curie grant agreement No 645743. The six partners were from Finland, the United Kingdom, Italy, South Africa and Namibia. The University of Lapland and the Faculty of Art and Design led the project. In this case, I was a doctoral researcher who did two one-month research exchanges in Windhoek, Namibia, and one two- week research exchange in Kimberley and Upington, South Africa. In addition, I worked with researchers from participating organisations and institutions in between the research mobility periods. This collaboration resulted in two academic articles (Itenge Wheeler et al., 2016; Wilson, Kuure, & Chivuno-Kuria, 2019).

The PARTY project focused on the means and tools for enabling youth to participate in the service development in their own communities and recognising the stakeholders that can enable change and increased inclusion in decision-making. During the research mobilities, my colleagues and I held five different workshops. We worked with one primary school in Namibia, San youth and young adults (13–24 years of age) and related stakeholders. The youth were living in poor or otherwise marginal conditions and were already facing the risk of becoming marginalised. These kinds of communities are sociological entities; they are the ecosystem of interactions and behaviours based on common values and expectations in respect to their considered genders, religious beliefs, economic conditions and resources or political ideals. In short, communities differ on the basis of their identity.

The workshops were documented using fieldwork research methods. These were applied so that the documentation was not done only by me, the researcher, but also by participants and other collaborators. Through this kind of data collection, it was possible to include the complexities and different community opinions as well as the viewpoints of the method. To put it briefly, it was an important discovery that it was not only I who was interested in workshops and what happened in them, but it is all of us who participated in them. Collaborative documenting and analysing were especially important, as the communities I worked with were not familiar to me beforehand.

Data in PARTY included five documented design workshops in which the data consisted of fieldwork diary notes of the researcher, artistic outcomes, pictures, voice recordings and video clips of the workshops as well as debriefing recordings done after the workshops. In addition, travel documents, such as visa applications and project materials, were used as supporting material in the analysis of the results. The results of PARTY were published in Article II.

Workshops and their facilitation were an important way of actually realising the goals of the project. In this case, workshops were also a form of empowerment for the communities. A methods and tools handbook was developed at the end of the project that summed up practical guidelines for doing service design in the development context (PACO Design Collaborative, 2017). One of the goals of that handbook was to support local communities in expressing and developing matters important to them through a series of participatory actions. These actions are often in the form of workshops with different formats, such as meetings, brainstorming sessions, creative workshops or jams, which need someone to start the action and to follow a co-design process.

There were some challenges in positioning myself between different expectations and goals of the project and the communities. My role in the project was to execute research mobilities as a PhD student from a science and art university. For example, some publication expectations were connected to

this role. From the project funder’s perspective, the duration of the mobility and the amount of money used during it were calculated precisely. Moreover, it was highly important to communicate well the happenings of every mobility in the project, as the activities at the sites were a continuum, but different researchers and designers were running them. In the workshops, I was facilitator, service design expert, young woman and someone from Finland and the University of Lapland. Many times, something new, concrete and participatory was expected from me. Once, participants also asked me if I would tell them about the Bible and Jesus, which was a surprise to me, but not to the ones who knew that Finnish missionaries had worked in Namibia in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, in the workshops the goal was capability building, skills development and allowing ideas to emerge concerning and new possibilities to improve everyday life.

First workshop: Initiating collaboration

The first workshop was conducted in Windhoek, Namibia on the 8th and 9th of June in 2015. It was an initiating workshop including the project partners: University of Lapland (Finland), Namibia University of Science and Technology, Cape Peninsula University of Technology (South Africa), University of Leeds (United Kingdom) and PACO Design Collaborative (Italy). There were ten participants in the workshop. The aim of the workshop was to create guidelines and practical modes of operation for the project that would be sustainable, resilient and adaptable.

During the workshop, ethics, project schedule, research methods, documentation, workshop and reporting practices were discussed. Memos were produced for each, and they were shared in Basecamp, a collaborative project management and team communication platform used in the project. Also, the first draft of community engagement guidelines and a template for a fieldwork diary were created. The workshop was held in a meeting-like format where post- it-notes, electronic platforms and flip charts were used for collaboration. This work continued with the communities in August as it had been recognised early on that all the practices and documents of the project needed to be created in a participatory way and adapted to the communities’ needs. The results of the initial workshop set the practical direction of the project.

Second workshop: Amazing reading

The second workshop was held on 17th of June 2015 at Amazing Kids Private School and Academy in Windhoek, Namibia. It was a two-hour workshop, and 20 children aged nine to eleven participated in it. The aim of the workshop was to get children to participate in the design process as designers of alternative reading experiences. This workshop was a continuation of the reading challenge workshop held at the PDC 2014 Conference. The workshop in Amazing Kids

Private School and Academy was planned and facilitated by researchers and designers from Namibia University of Science and Technology, PACO Design Collaborative and University of Lapland.

The aim of the workshop was to encourage the children to design fun reading solutions that would suit them and also to encourage them and other children to read more. The session was held in the school library where children could move around and see books for inspiration (Figure 14). A workshop structure created by PACO Design Collaborative for children’s design workshops was used. The workshop started with facilitators telling the children about their favourite story books, what they liked about those and how books and reading had influenced them in their personal lives. The idea behind this was to convey why reading could be interesting and useful, and to use this activity as an icebreaker to help the children get over their fear of failure and get them to start talking about their ideas.

Figure 14. Amazing reading workshop.

The workshop consisted of seven short phases:

1. Introduction: The facilitators introduced themselves to the children, and the children were informed of the aim of the workshop.

2. Briefing: Children were informed of the phases of the workshop and the four facilitators’ role of guiding them through the process of designing their own best reading experience was explained.

3. Forming groups: The children were divided into different working groups. This was gamified. Children picked coloured paper from a bag, and the same colours formed a group.

4. Discussion: This consisted of posing questions to and from the children to stimulate their creativity and to reinterpret reading as an experience or a book as a service. Posting ‘what if’ questions was seen as a useful tool, with facilitators aiming to get children to come up with their own ‘what if’ questions.

5. Design process: It was up to the facilitator to assess if the questions posed by the children would lead them to designing more of an experience, service or product solution. The children were given an opportunity to pick through different materials they could use to build a prototype of their ideal reading experience.

6. Presentations: The children had the opportunity to describe their project’s outcome. Every group showed their outcome and explained it to others. 7. Award ceremony: Here, each child was presented with a certificate of

participation, and group photos of the facilitators and children were taken.

The overall aim of the workshop was to show children how to transform their creativity into concrete and communicable solutions. The results of this specific workshop were published in an academic article that was accepted to the PDC 2016 Conference held in Denmark (Itenge Wheeler et al., 2016).

Third workshop: Social sculpture

The third workshop was held in Upington, South Africa on 20th and 25th of September 2016. The workshop was organised with the San students of the N||uu Language School, Rosedale, Upington. There were 14participants in the workshop and four designers and researchers from the University of Lapland. This was the first workshop with the community, and we focused on getting to know the interests and everyday life of the youth.

At the time, the project had been going on for over a year, so some participatory methods had been mapped out and tested. We decided to work with social sculpture, a concept originally created by German artist Joseph Beuys in the 1970s, but then developed further by Suzanne Lacy and Rick Lowe in the United States during the 80s and 90s (Jordan, 2013). This method involves using art to develop a generation of shared ownership. Communities drive the process that is focused on listening in order to create empathy (Miettinen & Vuontisjärvi, 2016). In the workshop, the group of youth was invited to think of a message that was important to them and that they wanted to share with their community and future generations of San youth (Figure 15). While some of the participants drew posters, others documented their messages with video. The video recordings worked as a cultural probe for the stakeholders to increase their understanding of the San youth. For the posters, we used regular size A4 paper with markers. After the first workshop, the created posters were copied on coloured paper at a local printing centre. We took 10 prints of each of the posters. The second day of the workshop was reserved for distributing the posters to the Rosedale community.

Figure 15. Social sculpture workshops. Photos: Essi Kuure & Satu Miettinen.

The group continued the work on the second day of the workshop. Unfortunately, due to travel arrangements, I was not able to participate in this. The group walked together to display the posters, and the youth chose where they wanted to display them. Some posters presented strong messages such as ‘Stop child rape, they are leaders of tomorrow!’. Since these messages were too controversial for the youth to explain in public, it was safer to display the posters as a group. Social sculpture was seen to work on two levels: personal empowerment and expression and intervention on the community level (Miettinen & Vuontisjärvi, 2016).

After the poster intervention, the youth prepared a performance around their messages. The performance was a play with four acts that described how abuse and drugs were involved in their lives, directly or indirectly. This was an important way to process the messages and realise their meaning at the individual level. Planning and performing the play provided the opportunity to discuss the topics together and go beyond the individual level. The social sculpture method enabled the work with the San youth to occur and scaled up their message in the surrounding community.

Fourth workshop: Planning holiday school service and training facilitation skills

The fourth workshop happened in Windhoek, Namibia on the 19th of November 2016. The workshop was planned and organised with the San students living in Windhoek. They all were part of an association called //Ana-Djeh San Trust. At the workshop, San students co-designed week programmes of holiday schools that they planned to run in their home villages during the summer break, which was about to start after the workshop. The topic had emerged in a previous workshop, and the students wanted to continue developing their ideas in workshops and with design tools. During the workshop, the students also practised facilitation of planned activities, which included fun games, dancing, storytelling, Bible reading and drama.

The workshop lasted five hours. There were ten participants in the workshop and four facilitators, three from the University of Lapland and one from the University of Leeds. After breakfast and a welcome, the students ideated holiday school activities in three groups (Figure 16). After ideation, the activities were allocated to a holiday school weekly schedule. Students then shared their plans with other groups and chose one activity or day per group that they wanted to practice organising. The groups agreed on the roles that might exist in their summer school activities and then role played out the activities. After that, a discussion about how it went, what to keep and what needed to be changed was held. The learnings were shared and documented.

Figure 16. Holiday school workshop.

In the workshop, students used post-it notes and templates to plan the activities and then also participated in a test round through an embodied exercise. I worked in the workshop as an overall facilitator, keeping time and introducing the tasks to the groups. I also helped when there were questions or uncertainties in the groups about how to continue. Three other researchers of the PARTY project were each with one group of students. In the end, a discussion and list of needed materials and things to do in order to implement the holiday school was formulated with the group so that it would be easier to continue with the organising after the workshop. Also, overall group feedback and the researcher’s debriefing after the workshop were recorded.

Fifth workshop: Amazing kids

The fifth workshop was organised in the Amazing Kids Private School and Academy in Windhoek, Namibia on the 29th of November in 2016. This time, the workshop was organised for teachers and staff members of the school (Figure 17). The workshop lasted two hours due to the busy schedules of the teachers.

There were seven participants and three facilitators in the workshop. My collaboration with researcher and PhD student Helvi Itenge Wheeler from the Namibian University of Science and Technology (formerly known as Polytechnic of Namibia) was continued in this workshop. We had planned and organised together two previous workshops that dealt with the topic of enhancing reading culture activities with Namibian learners.

The workshop was divided into three parts, and the participants worked in two groups. The first task was to discuss and map out with post-it notes how everyone’s teaching could benefit from children being better readers. The groups discussed what the benefits could be from four angles: 1) in the classroom, 2) outside of the classroom, 3) for individual students and 4) for a group of students.

Figure 17. Amazing kids workshop.

Secondly, the results of the previous workshop done with children on 17th of June 2015 were presented and discussed. These were used as inspirations. The staff was interested in learning the results, as it had not been possible for them to participate in the workshop and they had heard stories about it from the students. The third phase was group work again. Each group visualised a typical day of teaching and the main things that happen during it using a clock template. Then, new concepts to support reading during the activities and in those specific environments were ideated. Finally, ideas were shared between the groups, and every participant voted on their favourite ideas. Also, the realisation of ideas after summer holiday that was about to start was discussed. After the workshop, the facilitators created a conclusion document that included suggestions for next steps, a template for planning monthly activities and contact information. This was shared with all the workshop participants.

Narrative literature review

Additionally, part of the PARTY context was a narrative literature review done with my co-author of Article II, Satu Miettinen. The outcome of the article was a framework for designers who work in the development context. In order to outline the theoretical layer of that framework, the World Design Research Group’s eight published dissertations (Bello, 2008; Huhtamaa, 2010; A. Judice, 2014; M. Judice, 2014; Miettinen, 2007; Nugraha, 2012; Reijonen, 2010; Sarantou, 2014) were analysed through a narrative literature review (Green, Johnson, & Adams, 2006). These were selected for the study because they represented the design phenomena examined in the paper.

The World Design Research Group was an international group of PhD researchers (from Brazil, Colombia, Finland, Indonesia, Mexico and Namibia) at Aalto University (formerly known as University of Art and Design Helsinki) who published their dissertations from 2007 to 2014. The group was established by the doctoral candidates themselves, and their mission was to develop design outside the market, with an eye on designing for countries outside Europe and North America.

The goal of the literature review was to identify central themes studied and discussed by the World Design Research Group in the development context. The review was focused on what had been done in the dissertation and what had been the central themes, titles and findings, especially in relation to design practice. Overall, the review was applied and structured to be flexible. Both of the authors of Article II read the eight published dissertations and made notes of the headline-level issues that were considered in them. The results were then discussed, and five overarching themes were identified in dialogue (narratives of the reading experience) with the co-author. The review also had elements of a thematic literature review but was called narrative because of the applied nature of it, the viewpoint towards dissertations which were reviewed as narratives of a research work done in the development context, and the narrative style of writing which was pursued by the authors. The narrative literature review complemented the theoretical perspective and its scope in my research.